The Historical Presidency: Fear and Loathing in Presidential Candidate Rhetoric, 1952-2016: Presidential Candidate Rhetoric

Abstract

In this article, we build on research on affective (emotion‐based) polarization in American politics by investigating whether and how it has manifested in campaigns for the presidency. Drawing on a new data set of more than 11,000 statements about opponents from presidential stump speeches over the 1952–2016 period, we use quantitative content analysis to examine trends in negativity, fearful content, and anger content in these statements. We also conduct case studies of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 elections to examine qualitative patterns in these statements. We find compelling evidence that negative, fearful, and angry content in candidate statements about their opponents has been increasing over time among presidential candidates. We also find indications that fearful and angry rhetoric toward opponents is becoming more directed toward opponents’ character flaws rather than their issue stances. Our research suggests that affective polarization in presidential campaigns is a long‐term, and likely durable, development.

Full text

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Fear and Loathing in Presidential Candidate Rhetoric, 1952-2016
Jesse H. Rhodes and Amber B. Vayo, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Accepted for Publication, Presidential Studies Quarterly
Abstract
In this paper, we build on research on affective (emotion-based) polarization in American
politics by investigating whether and how it has manifested in campaigns for the presidency.
Drawing on a new dataset of more than 11,000 statements about opponents from presidential
stump speeches over the 1952-2016 period, we use quantitative content analysis to examine
trends in negativity, fearful content, and anger content in these statements. We also conduct case
studies of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 elections to examine qualitative patterns in these statements.
We find compelling evidence that negative, fearful, and angry content in candidate statements
about their opponents has been increasing over time among presidential candidates. We also find
indications that fearful and angry rhetoric toward opponents is becoming more directed toward
opponents’ character flaws rather than their issue stances. Our research suggests that affective
polarization in presidential campaigns is a long-term, and likely durable, development.

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The 2016 presidential campaign was marked by an extremely high level of personal
invective issued by both Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald
Trump (Parry-Giles et al 2016; Nguyen 2016; Purdum 2016). Clinton used harsh language to
criticize her opponent on the campaign trail and in televised advertisements, repeatedly charging
Trump with lying, conspiracy-mongering, and race-baiting (Montanaro 2016; Fowler, Ridout,
and Franz 2016). Trump’s campaign was even more brutal. Unrestrained by conventional norms
of campaign propriety, the Republican nominee used his infamously sharp tongue to stir anxiety
and anger among his audiences, claiming that Clinton had used the position of Secretary of State
in the Obama administration to enrich herself, destroy the nation’s economic prosperity,
undermine American national security, and unleash a flood of undocumented immigration into
the country (Schreckinger 2015). Trump’s rhetoric was so incendiary that some rallies were
marred by hate speech and violence against individuals protesting his campaign (Parker 2016;
Zucchino 2017).
Yet, while many have noted the fear and anger characteristic to the 2016 Democratic and
(especially) Republican campaigns (Ball 2016; Zurcher 2016), there have been few efforts to
place these observations in historical perspective or link them to broader developments in the
political system. Were the fearfulness and rage that characterized the 2016 campaigns unique in
the history of modern presidential campaigning, or did these campaigns represent the
culmination of long-term trends? Are there parallels between patterns of fear and anger rhetoric
in presidential campaigns and patterns of fear and anger emotions in citizens’ partisan affiliations
and attitudes about the political parties? While scholars have provided powerful evidence of
“affective polarization” – that is, increasing anxiety about and anger toward members of the
opposing party and its candidates – in the electorate (Iyengar et al 2012; Iyengar and Westwood

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2015; Miller and Conover 2015; Abramowitz and Webster 2016; Mason 2016, 2018; Nicholson
et al 2016), we know little about whether and to what extent it has been present in presidential
campaigns.
In this paper we conduct a systematic quantitative content analysis of presidential
candidate statements about their opponents in stump speeches between 1952 and 2016 to
examine affective polarization in presidential campaigns. We complement this analysis with an
in-depth comparison of candidate statements about their opponents in the 1968, 1992, and 2016
elections, respectively, to assess qualitatively how candidates have elicited fear and anger toward
their opponents.
We find compelling evidence that negative, fearful, and angry content in candidate
statements about their opponents in stump speeches has been increasing over time. Once the
growing tendency of candidates to refer to their opponents is taken into account, the growth in
negative, fearful, and angry content in statements about the opponent is very large. We also find
that affective polarization in presidential campaigns is increasing more quickly among
Republican candidates relative to Democratic candidates. Finally, our qualitative analysis
indicates that fearful and angry rhetoric toward opponents is becoming more directed toward
opponents’ character flaws rather than their issue stances.
Our work provides a new type of evidence that “fear and loathing across party lines”
(Iyengar and Westwood 2015) is increasingly pervading the political landscape, by showing that
it is infecting campaigns for the highest elected office in the land. To be sure, this development
has been exacerbated by the dynamics of the 2016 campaign – and, in particular, by Donald
Trump’s uniquely brutal and truth-defying rhetoric – but it is not attributable to it. Even if we
remove Trump (and Hillary Clinton) from the analysis, affective polarization among both

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Democratic and Republican candidates has been growing steadily over time. Furthermore,
intensifying partisan polarization in virtually all areas of life – from explicitly political decisions
to everyday lifestyle choices – provides strong reason to believe that, at least for the time being,
affective polarization in presidential campaigns is likely to remain with us for the foreseeable
future. Put simply, the “politicization of everything” (Wall Street Journal 2017) encourages
presidential candidates to make greater use of negative, fearful, and angry rhetoric as a way to
mobilize partisans in today’s highly competitive elections. Today, the question is not whether
presidential campaigns have polarized affectively, but whether it is possible to return to a more
measured style of campaigning.
Fear, Anger, and Partisan Polarization in American Politics
Extreme partisan polarization is a central feature of contemporary American politics.
Over the last five decades, political parties in Congress have increasingly moved further away
from each other ideologically (Hetherington 2001; McCarty et al 2006; Theriault 2008; Bafumi
and Herron 2010). And, while there is some disagreement over the scope of ideological
polarization in the mass public (Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Abramowitz and Saunders 2008;
Levendusky 2009), scholars have found powerful evidence of “affective polarization”, “an
identity-based polarization characterized by in-party favoritism and a strong dislike of out-
partisans” (Nicholson et al 2016:84; see also Tajfel 1974, 2010; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler
2004; Iyengar et al 2012; Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Huddy et al 2015; Miller and Conover
2015; Mason 2018).
Recent research points to a large increase in affect-based partisan polarization in the mass
public since the 1980s. This development has been driven not by increasingly positive views of

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one’s own party, but by increasingly negative views of the opposing party (Iyengar et al 2012;
Abramowitz and Webster, 2016). Partisans’ feeling thermometer ratings of their party have
remained stable over time, but their ratings of the opposing party have become much more
negative (Iyengar et al 2012). Partisans also increasingly ascribe negative attributes, such as
“hypocrisy” and “close-mindedness”, to opposing candidates and members of the opposing party
(Iyengar et al 2012; Mason 2013; Iyengar and Westwood 2015).
While affective polarization is generally characterized by negative affect toward the out-
party, two specific negative emotions play an especially important role – fear, characterized by
perceptions of out-group threat and uncertainty about the situation and how to respond; and
anger, characterized by feelings of out-group blameworthiness for ethical/moral offenses and
certainty about steps needed remediate the situation (Banks and Hicks 2016). For example,
Iyengar and Westwood (2015) use a variety of experiments to show that partisans perceive
members of the opposing party as untrustworthy and therefore threatening. But anger also
appears to play an important role: stronger partisans express a higher degree of anger toward
candidates and members of the opposing party (Mason 2015; Miller and Conover 2015; Huddy,
Mason, and Aaroe 2015).
Affective Polarization and Presidential Campaigns
Presidential campaigns (amplified by an increasingly partisan media) have been singled
out as a likely source of affective polarization among ordinary citizens (Iyengar et al 2012:408).
While plausible, this claim has not been investigated in depth. There are some indications of
increasing overall negativity in presidential campaigning, at least in terms of the proportion of
campaign advertisements devoted to criticizing the opponent (e.g. Benoit 2001; Geer 2012), but

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there have been no studies of over-time trends in specifically fearful or angry content about
opponents. This distinction is important because, while fear and anger emotions are encompassed
by the broad category of negativity, they are not synonymous with it (Soroka 2014: 29). It is thus
important to examine not only the broad category of negativity, but also the more specific
emotions of fear and anger.
Data and Methods
The subject of this study is negativity – and more specifically, fear and anger emotional
content - in explicit statements by presidential candidates about their rivals for the presidency.
To gather explicit statements by presidential candidates about their opponents, we developed a
computer program to comb through hundreds of stump speeches made by major-party
presidential candidates delivered between 1952 and 2016 that we collected from various sources,
and collect statements in which candidates referred to their opponents by first and/or last name or
mentioned “my opponent”.
We used both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess trends in emotional content
relating to fear and anger in presidential candidate statements about their opponents. For our
quantitative content analysis, we used a dictionary-based method, which involves counting the
frequency of keywords associated with particular overarching concepts or themes (Stone, Bales,
Namenwirth, and Ogilvie 1962; Hart 1984; Lim 2008; Young and Soroka 2012; Azari 2014;
Rhodes and Johnson 2017). We applied three keyword dictionaries: a dictionary of Negative
words, a dictionary of Fear words, and a dictionary of Anger words. We calculated two main
measures based on the counts of keywords from our dictionary-based content analysis: the
standardized frequency of negative/fear/anger terms (the frequency of negative/fear/anger words

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per 1,000 words of statements about the opponent); and the standardized volume of
negative/fear/anger content (the frequency of negative/fear/anger words per 1,000 words of
statements about the opponent X the frequency of statements about the opponent per 1,000
words of speech).
The standardized frequency measure provides a basis for making direct comparisons of
the rate of negative/fearful/angry words per statement across candidates; but it does not adjust for
differences in the frequency of statements about the opponent across candidates. In contrast, the
standardized volume measure takes into account differences across candidates in the frequency
of statements about the opponent, and thereby provides a more global assessment of (change in)
the overall affective tenor of presidential campaigns.
For our qualitative content analysis, we focused on the campaigns of 1968, 1992, and
2016. We selected these campaigns because they cover a large swath of our time series, feature
different partisan election outcomes, involve both open races and races featuring an incumbent,
and provide variation across a wide array of social, economic, and national security conditions.
We engaged in a qualitative interpretation of statements from candidates from both parties, with
a view toward identifying patterns of continuity and change in the substantive meaning of these
statements.
A Quantitative Overview of Presidential Campaign Speeches
Over the 1952-2016 period, we gathered 2,709 speeches in total – 1,510 by Democratic
candidates, and 1,199 by Republicans. As Figure 1 shows, the number of speeches made by
candidates of both parties per campaign has declined noticeably since the high-water mark of the

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1950s and early 1960s (linear trend lines have been added to ease observation of over-time
patterns).
As the number of speeches per campaign has declined, the length of speeches by both
Democratic and Republican candidates has increased, as Figure 2 shows. Among Democratic
candidates, the average number of words per speech has almost doubled over this period, while
the average for Republicans has increased somewhat more slowly.
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Number of Speeches
Figure 1: Number of Speeches by Democratic and Republican Candidates
per Campaign, 1952-2016
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Candidates
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Linear
(Democratic
Candidates)
Linear
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Average Words per Speech
Figure 2: Average Words per Speech, Democratic and Republican
Candidates, 1952-2016
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Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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Together, these developments point to a shift in the character of presidential stump
speeches, from relatively short “whistle-stop”-type speeches to significantly longer, more
substantial addresses. Finally, and very importantly, the frequency of references to the opponent
in campaign speeches by both Democratic and Republican candidates has increased substantially
over time, as shown in Figure 3. Among Democratic candidates, the average number of
references to the opponent per 1,000 words of address is 2.02 (St.Dev.=1.32); but the rate varies
between a low of .12 (Lyndon Johnson in 1964) and a high of 4.27 (John Kerry in 2004).
Republican candidates averaged 2.41 references to the opponent per 1,000 words of speech
(St.Dev.=2.06), with a low of 0 (Richard Nixon in 1972) and a high of 6.09 (Donald Trump in
2016).
Notably, the fact that presidential candidates are paying increasing attention to their rivals
is broadly consistent with the argument that candidates are increasingly making campaigns into
contests of conflicting political identities.
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Figure 3: References to Opponent per 1,000 Words of Speech, Democratic
and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
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Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear
(Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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Affective Polarization in Candidate Statements about the Opponent: Dictionary-Based
Quantitative Content Analysis
But are candidates increasingly using negative (or fearful or angry) words in discussing
their opponents? To begin to answer this question, we examine patterns in the standardized
frequency of Negative words in candidate statements about their opponents.
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The figure suggests important differences in trends in the frequency of Negative words in
statements about opponents between Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.
Among Democratic candidates, while there has been variation in the frequency of negative
words in statements about the opponent over time (Mean=32.57; St.Dev.=8.57), the linear trend
is essentially flat. In contrast, Republican candidates have increasingly used negative words in
statements about their opponents. While on average Republican candidates have used almost 34
negative words (St.Dev.=18.72) per 1,000 words about their opponents on average, the linear
1
While the frequency of statements about opponents by both Democratic candidates and Republican candidates has
increased between 1952 and 2016, the number of words per statement referring to the opponent has not increased
over time. In fact, the trends in the number of words per statement referring to the opponent are flat for both
Democratic and Republican candidates. Thus, any trends in the frequency of negative/fear/anger words per
statement cannot be due to changes in the length of statements about opponents.
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Negative Words per 1,000 Words of
Statements about Opponent
Figure 4: Standardized Frequency of Negative Words in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic
Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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trend suggests an increase of almost 1 additional negative word per 1,000 words for each
campaign between 1952 and 2016.
This measure of negativity holds constant variation across candidates in the frequency of
statements about opponents. But if we want to understand the contributions of presidential
campaigns to the political environment of affective polarization, we may not want to hold the
frequency of statements about opponents constant. Therefore, we also present trends in the
standardized volume of negative content in statements about the opponent, in Figure 5.
As Figure 5 suggests, the standardized volume of negative content about opponents over the
course of the campaign has increased substantially among both Democratic and Republican
candidates. Among Democratic candidates, this development is largely due to an increase in the
frequency of statements about the opponent even as the frequency of negative words per
statement has remained relatively steady; while for Republican candidates it reflects both an
increase in the frequency of statements about the opponent and an increase in the frequency of
negative words per statement.
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Negative Words per 1,000 Words of
Statement about Opponent X Statements
about the Opponent per 1,000 Words of
Address
Figure 5: Standardized Volume of Negative Content in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic
Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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Together, Figures 4 and 5 provide considerable indications of affective polarization in
presidential campaigns, especially among Republican candidates. To deepen the investigation,
we assess trends in the frequency of keywords indicative of fear and anger emotions in candidate
statements about their opponents. In Figure 6, we present trends in the standardized frequency of
words in our Fear dictionary in candidate statements about their opponents.
Similar to the results presented in Figure 4, the figure points to differences between
Democratic candidates and Republican candidates. Among Democratic candidates, while the
frequency of use of fear words has varied some over time, there is essentially no trend in the
frequency of use. In contrast, among Republican candidates the standardized frequency of fear-
related words has been growing over time. From fewer than 30 fear words per 1,000 words of
statement about the opponent in 1952, the frequency of fear words about the opponent in
Republican statements rises to nearly 50 by 2016.
In Figure 7, we present trends in the standardized volume of fearful content. We find
increases in the standardized volume of fearful content about opponents among both Democratic
and Republican candidates, with the trend being especially pronounced among Republican
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Statements about Oponent
Figure 6: Standardized Frequency of Fear Words in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic
Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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candidates. The trends presented in Figure 7 reinforce the impression of increasing affective
polarization in presidential campaigns, by showing that, on the whole, presidential candidates are
increasingly projecting fearful language in their statements about their opponents.
But what role has the emotion of anger played in candidates’ discussion of their
opponents? Figure 8 presents the trend in the standardized frequency of anger words in
statements about the opponents for Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively.
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Fear Words per 1,000 Words of
Statement about Opponent X
Statements about Opponent per 1,000
Words of Address
Figure 7: Standardized Volume of Fear Content in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic
Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear
(Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)
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Anger Words per 1,000 Words of
Statements about Opponent
Figure 8: Standardized Frequency of Anger Words in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic
Candidates
Republican
Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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In this instance – and unlike our findings for negative and fearful words respectively - the figure
reveals virtually identical, and increasing, trends among Democratic and Republican presidential
candidates. By consequence, we also observe substantial increases in the standardized volume of
anger content in statements about opponents among Democratic and Republican candidates, as
shown in Figure 9, with the trend being especially pronounced among Republican candidates.
These patterns provide strong empirical evidence of increased affective polarization in
presidential campaigns. Notably, though, the patterns are different for Republican and
Democratic candidates, respectively. Republicans exhibit increased growth in the standardized
frequency of negative, fearful, and angry words per statement about opponents, while Democrats
show only increased growth in the standardized frequency of angry words. Moreover, over-time
increases in the standardized volume of negative/fearful/angry content are consistently greater
among Republican candidates. For example, the slope of the linear trend of the standardized
volume of anger content for Republican candidates is 15.09; but the slope for Democratic
candidates is 6.07. Together, these patterns indicate that affective polarization in presidential
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about Opponent X Statements about Opponent
per 1,000 Words of Address
Figure 9: Standardized Volume of Anger Content in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2016
Democratic Candidates
Republican Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

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campaign rhetoric has occurred more rapidly and consistently for Republican candidates than for
Democratic candidates.
Affective Polarization in Candidate Statements about the Opponent: The Campaigns of
1968, 1992, and 2016
To further investigate how affective polarization has influenced presidential campaigns,
we turn to qualitative content analysis of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 campaigns. Our analysis
suggests that the rhetoric of presidential candidates has become more explicitly personal over
time, increasingly grounding emotions of fear and/or anger in concerns about opponents’
character flaws as opposed to their policy proposals.
1968: Fearing and Loathing the Status Quo
The 1968 contest between Democratic candidate and vice president Hubert Humphrey
and Republican challenger Richard Nixon cannot be separated from the social conditions
surrounding the campaign, including the massive public protests against an increasingly
unpopular war, urban riots, political assassinations, and a Democratic nominating convention
marred by violence. In spite of the charged context, the rhetoric of Democratic nominee Hubert
Humphrey toward Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, was relatively measured. Humphrey
savaged Nixon’s judgment – in particular, what he presented as Nixon’s dangerous hawkishness
and resistance to international cooperation - but he closely linked this assessment to specific
examples of Nixon’s alleged policy misjudgments during his tenure as a prominent Republican
politician. For example, Humphrey suggested, “I worked with President Kennedy to get the
Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Mr. Nixon once called it catastrophic nonsense. But we got it-
-and the world is a safer place today.” Humphrey also sharply criticized Nixon’s risky views on
Vietnam, though again by using specific historic examples as the basis for his assessment:

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“I hope this Republican truth squad [sponsored by the G.O.P.] will tell you about those
eight Republican years [during the Eisenhower administration]. I hope they will tell you
about Mr. Nixon, who wanted to send our armed forces into Vietnam fourteen years ago
and that his president had to tell him to shut up.”
In many areas of policy, however, Humphrey’s chief criticism of his opponent was that
Nixon appeared to lack clear positions. Humphrey repeatedly demanded that his opponent clarify
his views on the vital issues of the day, either through direct inquiries (e.g., “Mr. Nixon, where
do you stand on [policy issue]?”) or through requests for the opportunity to debate the former
vice president on the issues. As Humphrey exclaimed in one address,
“I know that the name of Richard Nixon will appear on the ballot this election. The
question is, where is Richard? Has anyone heard him speak out clearly on a single major
issue before the American people this year? Has anyone heard him take a clear stand on
human rights, on education, on Medicare, on Vietnam?”
Through such rhetoric, Humphrey sought to elicit audiences’ anger by implying that Nixon was
not fully forthcoming about his policy positions. However, in comparison with explicit charges
of lying or misrepresentation made by candidates in subsequent elections, Humphrey’s
reproaches of Nixon were quite mild.
The primary exception to Humphrey’s avoidance of personality-based criticism came in
his exploitation of the popular trope that “Tricky Dick” was untrustworthy. As Humphrey
declared in a statement designed to elicit the anxiety of listeners, “It’s the same old Nixon--and
the people can’t trust him any more in 1968 than they could in 1952, 1956, or 1960.” The theme
was present in Humphrey’s criticism of Nixon’s stances in a variety of policy areas, from health
care ( “Any elderly person in Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania that will trust Richard Nixon with
Medicare is going to have a life of illness, I can tell you that”) to jobs and economic
development (“Mr. Nixon talks about the forgotten people. He ought to know - he forgot them.
His party forgot them.”). Again, however, in comparison with the brutal charges leveled by

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Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump against each other in 2016, Humphrey’s allegations of
Nixon’s untrustworthiness were extremely restrained.
Meanwhile, Nixon made so few direct references to Humphrey during the campaign – 72
in total, compared with Humphrey’s 994 references to Nixon - that he had comparatively limited
opportunities to elicit fear or anxiety about his opponent. In his statements referring to
Humphrey, Nixon’s major strategy was to link the vice president to the allegedly intolerable
status quo and thereby engender anxieties about the likely consequences of Humphrey’s
leadership. As Nixon charged,
“Mr. Humphrey has helped to make the policies of the last four years; he has never raised
a voice in public disagreement or protest against those policies; he has been the most
consistent and vocal defender of those policies. There is not a dime’s worth of difference
between the policies Hubert Humphrey offers America and the policies America has had
for the last four years.”
In contrast, Nixon promised, “[A] vote for Richard Nixon and the election of Richard Nixon in
November will mean there will be major changes made in January.”
For example, Nixon suggested that Humphrey’s participation in Johnson administration
counsels on Vietnam policy demonstrated that he suffered from a dangerous lack of judgment.
As he suggested,
“Hubert Humphrey has applauded American policy in Vietnam every step of the way; he
applauds it today. I believe that this administration has made grave errors in the conduct
of the war in Vietnam.”
More troublingly, through the use of implicit racial appeals (Mendelberg 2001) Nixon
sought to associate Humphrey with (what many whites viewed as) the adverse consequences of
civil rights initiatives advanced by the Johnson administration. Nixon portrayed his opponent as
complicit in the wave of riots and crime that shook the nation between 1965 and 1968 (Weaver
2007):

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“[A]s I see riots in 300 cities that took 200 dead and 7,000 injured, and when I see a poll
of a president’s committee saying that 43 percent of the American people are afraid to
walk on the streets of their cities at night, then I say that instead of defending the record
of the attorney general as does Hubert Humphrey, we need a whole housecleaning and
let’s get a new team in there that will restore respect for law and order.”
Nixon also linked Humphrey to civil rights and civil liberties decisions by the Supreme Court (of
which African Americans were important beneficiaries) that he portrayed as threats to domestic
order. “Mr. Humphrey refuses to take issue with the decisions of the Supreme Court…I believe
that some of our courts including the United States Supreme Court have gone too far in
weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country.” However, while these
arguments sought to portray Humphrey as a dangerous threat to traditional white prerogatives,
they largely avoided direct attacks on Humphrey’s personal integrity or morality.
In short, in 1968 both candidates waged tough campaigns designed in part to elicit
anxiety and outrage among audiences; but both were relatively restrained in their attacks on their
opponent’s character.
1992: Fear and Loathing about Tax Policy and Economic Inequality
The 1992 campaign between Clinton and Bush was dominated by the issues of economic
growth, taxation, and the size of government. Compared to the rhetoric from the 1968 campaign,
the language used by the candidates in 1992 was noticeably more focused on the opponents’
alleged deficiencies of character and morality.
In the context of one of the worst economies of the post-war era, Clinton frequently
sought to inspire fear in his audiences by blaming Bush for the economic devastation. As he
argued in one address,
“In the past two years alone, average family income has declined by almost $1,600. And
while Mr. Bush has been in the White House, three people have gone bankrupt for every

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one person who has gone to work. Ten years ago, our nation was first in the world in
wages. Now we’re thirteenth and dropping.”
In a similar vein, Clinton charged dramatically that “Four years ago we were asked to trust Mr.
Bush when he promised that the next century will be an American century. But over the past
eleven and a half years while the Reagan-Bush-Quayle team have been in charge of America’s
economic policy, we have gone from first in the world in wages to 13th; and the latest Census
figures plainly show that over two-thirds of the American people are working harder for less
money than they were making ten years ago.” Clinton also highlighted particular groups –
especially the middle class, the elderly, and children – which he believed were especially
threatened by Bush’s economic policies. For example, Clinton claimed melodramatically
“George Bush’s legacy is the destruction of [the] middle class.”
At the same time, Clinton sought to stoke listeners’ anger toward Bush by repeatedly
presenting him as a president who catered to the economic interests of special-interest lobbyists
and the wealthy while ignoring the needs of ordinary citizens (Rhodes and Johnson 2017). As he
bluntly put it in one address, “Mr. Bush stands for a government that springs into action
whenever a special interest needs a bailout or a tax break. But the red phone can ring off the wall
for years and years from average Americans and nothing ever happens.” In a slightly different
formulation, Clinton argued that Bush cynically ignored the economic interests of ordinary
Americans in favor of those of the rich – at least until an approaching election made that
approach imprudent: “The only time they start talking about your jobs is when their jobs are on
the line…They want to convince you that all we need to do is wait a little bit longer, and give
money to the very wealthy and wait for it to trickle down.” This line of rhetoric, which presented
Bush as the lackey of the well-to-do, represented a significant attack on Bush’s integrity.

20
Bush countered with his own dramatic claims about the threatening and outrageous
behavior of his Democratic opponent. Drawing on a classic Republican formulation (Gerring
1998), he sought to inspire fear by charging that Clinton’s “big government” proposals would
“destroy” the economy and “hit” the middle class. As he argued in one campaign address, “My
opponent thinks that every day is April 15th [Tax Day]. You know what happens then…[R]aising
taxes doesn’t create jobs, it destroys them (emphasis added).” In an alternative, but similarly
threatening, formulation, Bush exclaimed
“You know, my opponent reminds me of a tired guy looking into the medicine cabinet
trying to choose among a bunch of old prescriptions that expired years ago. Old medicine
will not cure our ills. Tax-and-spend will not solve our problems. It might kill off the
patient (emphasis added).”
Like Clinton, Bush argued that the middle class would bear the brunt of his opponent’s agenda.
“Now the liberal Congress is salivating waiting to pass all these new programs. But where will
[Clinton] get the money?...If Congress followed the example that Bill Clinton has set as governor
of Arkansas it would pass a tax program that would hit the middle class the hardest (emphasis
added).”
Meanwhile, Bush invoked common popular tropes about Clinton’s loose morals and
“slick” behavior to stoke audience anger with Clinton’s allegedly hypocritical campaign.
Clinton, Bush charged, was “a man who hedges or ducks on almost every tough issue, a man
who seems to feel strongly on both sides of almost every issue that is before this great nation.”
On the issue of trade, Bush claimed, “[Where Clinton stands] depends on who he’s standing in
front of. Sometimes he’s for opening markets. But when he talks to the protectionist lobby he
whips out his saxophone and plays a different tune.” Bush took a similar, and personally critical,
tack in describing Clinton’s approach to military defense, exclaiming “Of America’s place in the
world Governor Clinton talks the talk, says he’s for a strong military. But he walks the walk of

21
the liberals, whose idea of high-tech weaponry is the Super-Soaker squirt gun. And he wants to
slash our budget, our defense budget.” His criticism of Clinton’s approach to the environment
was more of the same: “Governor Clinton spoke in Pennsylvania he said what the Sierra Club
wanted to hear. They concluded that Governor Clinton was quote promising the protection of
old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. And then when he heard I was coming here, Mr.
Clinton cynically held out false hope to timber families by promising another meeting.”
Although Bush’s criticisms of Clinton bore some resemblance to Humphrey’s attacks on Nixon
in 1968, they went further by making the charges of untrustworthiness and hypocrisy explicit.
In 1992, the candidates’ criticism was quite policy-focused, especially when it came to
matters of jobs and economic growth, but appeals focused on arousing fear and/or anger based
on opponents’ alleged personal failures were becoming more pronounced. Clinton repeatedly
charged that Bush was in the pocket of wealthy elites; while Bush claimed that Clinton was a
“slick”, untrustworthy character with loose morals.
2016: Fear and Loathing Gets Personal
As in 1968 and 1992, both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican
standard-bearer Donald Trump used rhetoric in an effort to engender feelings of fear and loathing
among their audiences. In 2016, however, this rhetoric became even more intensely personal,
establishing over-arching narratives of rage and distrust, which in Trump’s case devolved into
wild conspiracy theorizing.
Clinton consistently portrayed Trump as a man whose bullying rhetoric and behavior
threatened to erode the nation’s moral norms and thereby make all Americans, but especially
historically disadvantaged groups, less safe. As she explained in one representative statement:

22
“Now the whole world has heard how Donald Trump treats women and what he thinks of
women. But, of course, you know it’s not only women that he has disrespected. He’s
insulted practically everybody. He went after a distinguished federal judge, Judge Curiel,
who was born in Indiana. And Trump said ‘Well, he couldn’t be trusted because his
parents were Mexican’.”
Through such disgraceful rhetoric and behavior, Clinton argued, Trump eroded mutual norms of
toleration and respect and thereby threatened the safety of Americans, especially recent
immigrants. As she suggested in one address, “Parents and teachers are already worried about
what they’re calling the Trump Effect. Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools,
especially targeting students of color Muslims and immigrants.”
Much like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton sought to spark anger among her listeners by
suggesting that her opponent catered to the interests of extremely wealthy people such as himself
to the exclusion of other members of society. As she argued,
“[Donald Trump] really believes if you give trillions – that’s with a T - trillions in tax
cuts to the wealthy, to millionaires and billionaires and corporations, everything will
work out. It’s really trickle-down [economics] on steroids. I believe differently - that we
must invest in working families, in the middle class, in small businesses that will power
the economy (emphasis added).”
Clinton also argued that Trump wanted to hand over management of the economy to “Wall
Street”: “He wants to do away with the rules that have been imposed on Wall Street. He basically
wants to let Wall Street - the banks, the hedge funds, all these other institutions, basically do
whatever they want again.” Further, Clinton claimed, Trump’s preoccupation with serving the
interests of the rich meant he would totally ignore the interests of less-advantaged economic
groups. For example, she suggested,
“I would like to hear Donald explain to American steelworkers filing for unemployment
why he put Chinese steel workers to work instead of steelworkers here in Pennsylvania.
And for all his talk about putting America first, he has made many of his products in 12
different countries. So if he wants to make America great again, why doesn’t he start by
making things in America?”

23
Clinton’s portrayal of Trump as the shill of the wealthy elite represented a substantial attack on
her opponent’s personal integrity.
Republican candidate Donald Trump sought to terrify his audiences about the prospects
of a Clinton victory. Taking fear-mongering to a new extreme, Trump declared that “The
election of Hillary Clinton would lead to the destruction of our country.” According to Trump’s
deeply personal attack on Clinton, the reason that his opponent represented a “threat[]..to the
very foundations of our Constitutional system” was that she sought to use the levers of
government for the purposes of “public corruption, graft, and cronyism.” In Trump’s wild, and
highly personalized, conspiracy theory, Clinton was in league with “a corrupt global
establishment” of corporations, campaign donors, and media elites who sought to establish a
new, and deeply un-American, order of “global governance, unlimited immigration, and rule by
corporations” that would “raid[] the country”, “surrender[] our sovereignty,” and destroy
American jobs. For these reasons, Trump declared apocalyptically, the outcome of the 2016
election “will determine whether or not we remain a constitutional republic, frankly.”
Echoing alt-right blogs and pundits, Trump elaborated this terrifying vision of a corrupt
conspiracy against America by detailing what he viewed as clear evidence of Clinton’s past and
present legal and ethical violations. Foremost among the charges leveled by Trump was the
explosive claim that, as Secretary of State, Clinton illegally set up a private email server to shield
her interactions with the “global establishment” and alleged “pay-for-play” scheme from federal
scrutiny, and, once the server was discovered, intentionally destroyed email and other evidence
in order to cover her tracks.
2
Trump also alleged that Clinton conspired with media actors to
2
Clinton did in fact set up and use a private email server to conduct public business in contravention of federal
rules; however, there is no evidence that she did so in order to conduct criminal activities, or that she intentionally
destroyed email to eliminate evidence of malfeasance.

24
obtain special advantages in the election. Alluding to a huge cache of email stolen from Clinton
campaign chairman John Podesta and made public by Wikileaks, Trump alleged that
“[T]he emails show that the Clinton Machine is so closely and irrevocably tied to media
organizations that she is given the questions and answers in advance of her debates.
Clinton is also given approval and veto power over quotes written about her in the New
York Times. And the emails show the reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the
Clinton Campaign on helping her win the election.”
In comparison with that of 1968 or 1992, the invective in 2016 was much more personal,
featuring unusually strong claims about the opponent’s personal corruption, depravity, and
immorality, as well as repeated allegations about the dire threat posed by the opponent to the
nation’s future. Republican Donald Trump’s rhetoric was especially incendiary insofar as it
featured claims that Democrat Hillary Clinton was implicated in a full-blown conspiracy against
the American people.
Discussion
In recent years, scholars have provided a growing body of evidence of affective partisan
polarization in American politics. However, to date this research has focused primarily on
identifying patterns of change in the content of public opinion. This study extends work in this
field by investigating whether and to what extent affective polarization has permeated one of the
most visible and influential processes in American national politics – presidential campaigns.
Examining more than 11,000 presidential candidate statements about their opponents over the
1952-2016 period, we use keyword-based content analysis, along with a qualitative interpretation
of candidate statements from the 1968, 1992, and 2016 campaigns, to investigate affective
polarization in presidential campaigns.

25
Our quantitative and qualitative results provide compelling evidence that presidential
candidate rhetoric has become increasingly characterized by affective polarization. Both
Democratic and Republican candidates have made increasing use of angry words in statements
about opponents, and Republicans have also made greater use of negative and fearful language,
as well. Once we take into account dramatic increases in the frequency of statements about
opponents among candidates from both parties, the shift toward negativity (and fearfulness and
anger) toward opponents is remarkable, and is especially pronounced among Republican
candidates. Moreover, our qualitative study of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 campaigns suggests that
candidates have increasingly presented their opponents as dangerous, unprincipled characters
under the sway of threatening domestic and foreign influences.
While it is tempting to chalk today’s divisive political culture up to a “Trump effect,” our
research indicates that the negativity in the 2016 campaign is an extension – though undoubtedly
also an exacerbation – of long-term trends in presidential campaigning. As Figures 10 and 11
show, even if we exclude the 2016 campaign from our analysis, there are clear upward trends in
the standardized volumes of fear and anger content, respectively, among both Democratic and
Republican candidates. Thus, it is simply not the case that the 2016 campaign in general – and
Trump’s ugly rhetoric in particular – represent a sharp break from past campaigns. Of course, the
tone of the 2016 campaign may promote the escalation of affective polarization in 2020. But if
this turns out to be the case, it would be a continuation of, rather than a departure from, a pattern
of development extending decades backward in time.

26
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
1952
1956
1960
1964
1968
1972
1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
2012
Anger Words per 1,000 Words of Statement about Opponent X
Statements about Opponent per 1,000 Words of Address
Figure 10: Standardized Volume of Fear Content in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2012
Democratic Candidates
Republican Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
1952
1956
1960
1964
1968
1972
1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996
2000
2004
2008
2012
Anger Words per 1,000 Words of Statement about Opponent X
Statements about Opponent per 1,000 Words of Address
Figure 11: Standardized Volume of Anger Content in Statements about
Opponent, Democratic and Republican Candidates, 1952-2012
Democratic Candidates
Republican Candidates
Linear (Democratic
Candidates)
Linear (Republican
Candidates)

27
Furthermore, our contemporary politics provides strong incentives to presidential
candidates to make use of appeals rooted in fear and anger. In this highly partisan context,
candidates can reasonably conclude that appeals calibrated to increase the anxiety and outrage of
their partisan supporters may be effective in increasing interest and enthusiasm, and thereby
benefit their campaigns. So long as this is the case, there are not strong reasons to anticipate
departures from the prevailing trends documented in this paper.
Does this mean that future campaigns will inevitably continue the race to the bottom of
civility? Will the 2020 campaign be as ugly as that of 2016? At the moment, most signs point to
the depressing conclusion that affective polarization in presidential campaigns is likely to
continue. However, there are a few reasons for guarded optimism. First, as our data show,
several winning campaigns in recent memory – Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign, George W. Bush’s
2004 campaign, and Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign – demonstrate that it is possible (at least
for incumbents) to secure electoral victory while deviating somewhat from the general trend
toward greater affective polarization. It is possible that a future candidate will learn from these
campaigns to craft a more civil – and effective – winning campaign in the future. Second,
Donald Trump’s historically low poll numbers provide some cause to believe that his corrosive
style of campaigning and governing has cost him political support. Should Trump be soundly
defeated in 2020 – especially by a candidate with a more positive campaign style – it is possible
that we will witness a break from the prevailing pattern. In the end, whether future campaigns
contribute to the restoration or further erosion of civility depends on the strategic choices of
presidential aspirants and the rhetorical preferences of citizens.

28
Appendix: Data and Methods
Using Stump Speeches as the Source for Our Data
We chose the stump speech as the preferred genre for our analysis because - unlike other
campaign communications such as televised campaign ads, website content, or social media
posts – stump speeches have played an integral role in campaigns over a long period of time and
can be analyzed in a comparable way across campaigns distant in time. Televised campaign
advertisement are of great importance in presidential campaigns. Unfortunately, while the
storyboards of presidential campaign ads are available for campaigns between 1952 and 2012
(television ads did not appear before 1952), information about the frequency of ad airings is not.
Because ads vary greatly in the frequency of airings, analyses that do not including airing data
misrepresent the overall tone of candidates’ messages. Websites and social media posts have
only recently become important to presidential campaigns; consequently, these media were not
appropriate for our purposes.
Gathering Statements by Candidates about Opponents from Stump Speeches
We gathered the full text of hundreds of Democratic and Republican presidential general
election stump speeches from several sources: Pew and the University of Pennsylvania’s
Annenberg Public Policy Center (Annenberg/Pew 1998) for 1952-1996; the Stanford Political
Communication Lab (Stanford Political Communication Lab 2000) for 2000; and the American
Presidency Project (American Presidency Project 2017) for 2004-2016. Unfortunately, there is
no comprehensive set of campaign speeches for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater’s 1964
presidential campaign. Scholars have searched Goldwater’s papers for a collection of his 1964
presidential campaign speeches, but have come away empty-handed (Vavreck 2009).

29
For each candidate and each campaign, we constructed a file containing the full text of
every stump speech made during the general election campaign (September 1-Election Day). The
next step involved isolating statements referring to each candidate’s rival for the presidency. To
do this, we wrote a Ruby script (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) to identify and capture
paragraphs explicitly mentioning the opponent by first and/or last name or using the phrase “my
opponent”. We ran this script on each file, and funneled captured statements into new files, one
for each candidate and campaign (our code is available on request). We also cleaned these new
files to remove “false positive” matches and other extraneous content.
Applying Content Analysis Dictionaries to Our Data
We applied three content analysis dictionaries – Negative, Fear, and Anger – to our data.
The Negative dictionary was developed by Young and Soroka (2012) for their Lexicoder
Sentiment Dictionary (LSD). The LSD combines and standardizes three of the largest and most
widely used lexical resources – Roget’s Thesaurus, the General Inquirer (GI; Stone et al 1962),
and the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID; Martindale 1975) – to create a very large valence
dictionary of Positive and Negative terms (the LSD is available from lexicoder.com). The
Negative dictionary is comprised of 2,858 word stems and short phrases. Although less specific
than the emotions of fear and anger, the Negative dictionary encompasses these emotions as well
as other negative content; and has been subjected to extensive validation tests against human
coders (Young and Soroka 2012; Soroka 2014). A random sample of 20 word stems from the
Negative dictionary is provided in Appendix Table 1 (‘*’s indicate wildcards to permit capture of
multiple words from the same stem).

30
Appendix Table 1: Random Sample of 20 Words from Negative Dictionary
chafe*
undefined*
blame
emptied
devour*
haunt*
problems
overcast*
labyrinth*
panic
vagrant*
restiv*
vanish*
opprobrious*
uncontrol*
pollut*
hazer
lurer
rusty*
pessimis*
We also developed dictionaries of keyword terms to represent the specific categories of
Fear and Anger, respectively, following the method of Soroka, Young, and Balmas (2015). To
construct these dictionaries, we drew on three venerable affect dictionaries with discrete
emotional categories: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Francis, and
Booth 2001); the RID (Martindale 1975); and the GI (Stone et al 1962). We used existing
categories when they were available and developed them from conceptually related categories
when they were not. We used the existing categories anxiety and anger from LIWC. From RID,
we used the existing category anxiety, as well as the related category aggression. The GI
categories pain and weak were used to identify fear-related words, while the categories hostile
and vice were used to obtain anger-related words. We combined fear- and anger-related words

31
from across LIWC, RID, and GI to create our overarching dictionaries. Our final Fear dictionary
contained 678 unique word stems, while our final Anger dictionary contained 955 word stems.
Both dictionaries employed wildcards. A random sample of 20 word stems from each dictionary
is presented in Appendix Table 2. The full word stem list for each dictionary is available from
the authors upon request.
Appendix Table 2: Random Sample of 20 Words from Fear and Anger Dictionaries
Sample from
Fear Dictionary
Sample from Anger
Dictionary
untrained
nightmar*
declin*
particular*
bitter*
spoil*
bashful*
traitor*
partial*
mob
plea
trampl*
trauma*
accost*
commoner*
protest*
trifl*
mangl*
succumb*
excommunicat*
liab*
confront*
slav*
nag*
somber
rebel*
passiv*
guilt
dismal*
unfeeling
scratch*
void
lower*
suicid*
indign*
rival*
distress*
loath*
uneasy
angrier
We conducted our dictionary-based content analysis using Lexicoder (Young and Soroka 2012),
a software system designed explicitly for this purpose (the software is available for free for
academic research applications from lexicoder.com). Lexicoder applies dictionaries to texts and
returns the counts of all keywords associated with these dictionaries present in the texts.

32
We applied the various dictionaries to files containing the full texts of candidate
statements about their opponents to ascertain the number of keywords associated with each
dictionary in each file. Using this information in combination with other data we gathered about
the speeches made by each candidate – specifically, the total number of words in all statements
referring to the opponent made by each candidate, the total number of statements referring to the
opponent made by each candidate, and the total number of words in all of the speeches given by
the candidate - we were able to construct our two main measures: the standardized frequency of
negative/fearful/angry words, and the standardized volume of negative/fearful/angry content.
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